Lawrence Goldman *69 *76 arrived at Princeton in 1967, just
weeks after riots ravaged Newark and came to define New Jersey’s
largest city in the minds of many Americans. As a graduate student in
the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Goldman
studied what seemed to be Newark’s unstoppable decline. Recently,
however, though Newark remains one of the nation’s poorest and most
violent cities, violent crime has declined, and urban pioneers have created
new residences, eateries, and shops. Over the last two decades, Goldman
has helped promote Newark’s revival as a driving force behind the
creation of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which he now leads
as president and chief executive officer. That work earned him the James
Madison Medal, which he is to receive on Alumni Day. He spoke recently
about the city and the arts to PAW’s Mark F. Bernstein ’83.

When did you first become interested in Newark?

I arrived to do my graduate work in urban affairs 15 days after the
Newark riots. It was impossible at that time to think seriously about
urban affairs and not somehow address what had happened in Newark and
many other American cities. I studied Newark, wrote about Newark, and
eventually became involved in the campaign to elect Kenneth Gibson, the
first black mayor of Newark, in 1970. When I was living in Princeton in
the late ’60s and early ’70s, Newark was really my second
home.

Has the city been revitalized?

There has been a complete metamorphosis — not just in physical
terms, but in how people think about Newark. Having spent more than 30
years working on urban change, I have concluded that the first turn a
city has to make is a psychological turn, and Newark has made a seminal
psychological turn. There is a new sense of hope and of momentum.

What caused it?

The recent changes politically, with the election of Mayor Cory Booker
in 2006 and an almost totally new municipal council, have been very important.
The nonprofit institutions — the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra,
the Newark Museum, the universities and law schools, and the New Jersey
Performing Arts Center — also have had a huge impact.

How has the arts center contributed to the city’s revitalization?

For Newark to have an arts center that aesthetically and acoustically
is considered among the two or three best in the country emphatically
demonstrated that we could rise above the average and do something that
was internationally significant. Second, the arts center has brought people
to Newark from around New Jersey and New York — people who had either
never been here before or had organized their lives since the 1967 riots
in a way that averted Newark completely.

In an age of video and music on demand, how big a market is there
for a public arts center?

This is a real problem. We have an “I’ll decide, not you”
generation, and it’s tough to get them to come to the performing
arts. Things like TiVo and DVDs have made a whole realm of competition
for the live performing arts that didn’t exist before. I believe
some performing arts centers will find ways to be flexible and adapt,
and some will not.

Who is the audience?

Our target audience is as diverse as possible. We are extremely proud,
for example, that 26 percent of our audience is other than Caucasian.
I don’t think there is another arts center in the world that has
that kind of diversity.

Has modern art lost some of its connection to its audience?

You have to strike the right balance between pushing the audience and
satisfying it. Each arts center finds a different balance point. Outside
of Carnegie Hall, for example, we have the most important classical orchestra
series in the country. Now, classical music is having a harder time finding
its audience, but we feel it is important to have a center that keeps
that art form alive. We’re trying to find ways to make it more accessible,
less stuffy, less formal, and more fun. But the quality of the music in
the end is what it’s about. Does that mean we have lost our connection
to our audience? Some would say yes, because there are fewer people interested
in classical music. On the other hand, we are trying to broaden the audience.

Have the expectations of a performing arts center changed?

It used to be that you just had to put high art on the stage and an
ad in the newspaper. Now arts centers have to be bigger than what’s
on our stages. I think they have to become town squares for their communities,
offering a full range of activities in addition to the performances. In
a world where people tend to be disconnected by electronics, arts centers
can play the role of rehumanizing human intercourse.